Looking back: Daniel Callahan

The dominant view of bioethics frames issues in terms of autonomy and individual rights. A retrospective in the Cambridge Quarterly of Heathcare Ethics, by Daniel Callahan, one of the grand old men of American bioethics, is a reminder of a broader and more communitarian view of the discipline.

Callahan is a restless thinker who did his undergraduate study at Yale and his PhD at Harvard. But the academic life did not suit him and he turned to journalism and for several years edited Commonweal, an influential Catholic journal. After splitting with the Church over abortion, in 1969 he co-founded The Hastings Center, a leading bioethics think tank.

Here are a few paragraphs:

I became known as an autonomy-basher, not because I objected to autonomy as an important human value but because I objected to an undercurrent trend that seemed to reduce ethics itself to nothing but individual free choice disconnected from an even more important question: what counts as a good or bad choice, a good or bad person, or a good or bad society? Those questions...